Lester Atwell; Combat Soldier Published His Diary of WWII

Lester Atwell, an Army infantryman who wrote what fellow veterans have considered perhaps the most authentic account ever published of a combat soldier’s view of World War II, has died. He was 92.

Atwell died Tuesday at the home of his nephew, Bill Atwell, in Cary, N.C., said Mitchell Kaidy, who served with Atwell in Europe during the war.

When Atwell’s book, titled “Private,” was published in 1958, Times reviewer Wirt Williams praised it as first-rate. Not a novel, the book represented Atwell’s war diary (with names changed) about his unit’s advance across France in 1944 and sudden baptism by fire at the Ardennes in what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Echoing comments by Kaidy and other soldiers, the reviewer wrote: “The book . . . gives as complete and accurate a picture of men in and awaiting combat as one is likely to find.”

Later, Atwell moved into fiction writing. Among his novels was the 1963 “Love Is Just Around the Corner,” which was made into a Broadway musical called “Flora the Red Menace” starring Liza Minnelli, and the 1965 “Life With Its Sorrow, Life With Its Tear.”

Both were coming-of-age stories set in the 1930s in Atwell’s native New York. The latter included a World War II epilogue.